In air-conditioning systems called multi-air-conditioners for buildings, respective devices such as an outdoor unit (outdoor device), an indoor unit (indoor device), individual remote controls, and a centralized remote control are connected by an air-conditioning network. In air-conditioning systems of this type, after completing testing of the individual devices (unit testing), system testing combining the respective devices (also called combined testing) is performed.
System testing requires hypothesizing the maximum scale of the air-conditioning system, regardless of the actual supplied scale. Consequently, it is necessary to construct an air-conditioning system for system testing in which approximately 250 devices are connected to a network, for example. For this reason, in the related art, for large-scale devices such as outdoor devices and indoor devices, system testing is performed by connecting only the control boards built into those devices to the network.
However, the above system testing of the related art has the following problems.
(1) Even without connecting the actual devices such as the air conditioner and indoor devices, it is still necessary to construct an air-conditioning system for system testing in which many control boards are connected to a network. For this reason, a large work space is required, and securing a testing location is not easy.
(2) The work of connecting each control board to the network is required, and in addition, work such as attaching resistors instead of sensors is required for each control board so that errors do not occur in the IT process with the various sensors provided in the outdoor devices and the indoor devices. In other words, constructing an air-conditioning system for system testing is extremely labor-intensive.
In contrast, Patent Literature 1 discloses technology that simulates the behavior of an air conditioner on a computer.